The Catch

A film set in a Japanese mountain village. The year is 1945. The last days of the war. An aircraft comes down. The pilot survives. He is American and Black. The villagers catch him. They do not know what to do. The army should be told but the road is long and nobody wants to go. They lock him in a cellar. From there the film takes place in the village. The village is hungry. There is no harvest, most of the men are at the front, and food is rationed. The man has to be fed. That is a problem. The village has an order. A headman, a temple, family elders, and those who are excluded. One family is counted beneath the village. Nobody talks to them. There is a deserter too. A young man who ran from the army is hiding in the woods. The narrative sets these side by side. The children go to the cellar. They watch the man, then they play with him. The adults do not want it. Then something happens. A child disappears. The village finds the reason: the man in the cellar. There is no proof. But it is decided. What the narrative is interested in is not war but a community: its idea is that the village loads its own tensions onto an outsider, and that the outsider is there for that. The pilot barely speaks. The narrative gives him no inner life and that is deliberate. The violence comes at the end and is collective. Then the war ends. The village continues as if nothing had happened. The source is a long story by Kenzaburo Oe. This is among Nagisa Ōshima's early films. The images are black and white. Rentaro Mikuni, Akiko Koyama, Yōko Mihara and Hugh Hurd are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the Japanese new wave and hard social narrative. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an easy watch; the narrative leaves sympathy with no character and its last section is directly brutal.